City of London signs up Accenture to centralise procurement

The City of London Corporation has signed a deal with Accenture worth up to £12.5m to deliver a new procurement shared service centre.

The service will undertake procurement and procure-to-pay functions across all divisions of the City of London.

The deal should save the City of London more than £30m over five years, according to Mark Lyons, Accenture's UK and Ireland managing director for health and public service, who added that the company's fee would be tied to savings made.

Chris Bilsland, the City of London Corporation's financial director, said the more the corporation saves, the more Accenture will be paid.

"If Accenture hits all their targets and provide both transformational savings, and quality, then we will pay them somewhere in the region of £12.5m," he said.

"We are looking to save money, and we think we can drive better bargains. The new system will help us do this. Also, by making procurement more streamlined we hope to become more customer efficient," added Bilsland.

It is hoped that this unified procurement function will help the City better execute the latest techniques, such as category and demand management, as well as improved cost management.

Accenture said change management will be essential to the transformation programme, and it will provide training to both the City staff involved with the project, and those who will be running it once implemented.

City of London will have 40 people working on the project alongside 20 from Accenture.

"As an organisation, we employee 3,500, and it is expected that this new system will be used by each and every one of them at some point or other," said Bilsland.